It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
by lazaefair
Summary: Three Supernatural ficlets written for a Dean/Castiel holiday challenge on Livejournal. Pretty much unrelated, though a storyline could be extrapolated if you must. Ratings range from PG to NC-17.
1. Zat You, Santa Claus?

"You are not telling me that Saint Nicholas is a demon. I mean, if it were true--" Dean was still trying to force this mind-bogglingly nonsensical piece of information through his head, "--seriously? He'd be like the _worst demon ever."_

"Well," Castiel admitted a little reluctantly, "you might call him a...lapsed demon."

"Lapsed demons, half-fallen angels," Dean threw his hands up because it was a dramatic kind of day, "You guys are really starting to get repetitive with this whole 'everyone is morally gray' schtick." He pointed a finger. "What's next, you're gonna tell me everyone's gay?"

"Saint Nicholas might once have been lapsed, but evidence suggests he is reverting back to his true form as Lucifer's pull increases," Castiel steadfastly ignored Dean's gesticulations, but now sported a tiny perplexed line between his eyebrows.

"Saint Nicholas, the old bearded demon who gives toys to children and eats milk and cookies," Dean mused out loud. "Yep, still sounds ridiculous. And what the hell does this make Krampus?"

"Another demon," Castiel said as if it were extremely obvious.

"Okay, fine, whatever," Dean raised his hands. "What do we need to do?"

Then there was talk about pine branches and strategy and "wait, it's March, why the hell are we hunting Santa in March?" and "welcome back, Sammy, guess what Castiel wants us to do?" and eventually Castiel was leaving to make the final preparations while the brothers got ready for the hunt on their end.

"And Dean," Castiel said, turning back suddenly, his tone infused with that subtle sense of long-suffering patience that only angels and mothers could really pull off, "angels and demons do not recognize genders such as they are defined by humans, so we are technically asexual. When lust or copulation becomes a factor, generally we are pansexual."

He whooshed away.

Sam stared at the space where Castiel had just been occupying. "Okay, what."

Dean put his hand over his eyes and muttered, "I think the angel's developing a sense of humor."

"As long as it's always at your expense," Sam said. "Also: I do not want to know what kind of conversation you guys could've possibly been having for him to consider that a parting shot."

"Bitch."

"Jerk."

The brothers smirked for a second, and then Dean slid the magazine into his gun with a satisfied click. "Let's go hunt down some Santa."


	2. Trickster Treats

"My life is a WB family drama," Sam says out loud. "I'm the sitcom dad, my older brother and his angel are the obnoxious kids, and I can't even get occasionally laid with my younger, hotter sitcom wife because _there isn't one. _This better be getting phenomenal ratings in heaven!" This last part is said, with accompanying glare, to the ceiling.

If Dean were here, he'd probably say something like, "The network's called CW now, get with the times, Sammy," and Sam would ask him how he knew that and make insinuations about Dean's girly TV-watching habits, but Dean is six years old and frolicking with six-year-old Castiel in the living room, so Sam's stuck with getting his daily snark from himself.

A door slams, and they're not even in the living room anymore. "What...?" Sam leaps from the couch and wrenches the front door open to find Dean and Castiel now frolicking in the knee-deep snow (waist-deep for them) _without any coats or gloves._

"DEAN! CASTIEL! GET BACK HERE, YOU'LL CATCH YOUR DEATH OF COLD!" Sam bellows, then slaps himself in the forehead, because, Jesus, he's morphed into June Cleaver.

He tromps back inside to snag the mismatched kiddie coats (emergency trip to Goodwill, $3 each) from the couch where they'd been thrown last time and tromps back, prepared to do chase. Six-year-old Dean is going to wear his coat whether he likes it or not, because Sam is _not_ explaining to God or whoever's up there whenever he kicks the bucket that he let the Chosen One die of exposure while he was chucking snowballs at the angel of Thursday in Bobby Singer's front yard.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Dean gravitates towards the Nerf guns, the ridiculously big ones.

"Belt fed, fully automatic action," Dean reads off gleefully from the obnoxiously large box and Sam tries not to picture Dean unloading 50 Nerf darts per second in Bobby's living room.

"Should've known you'd go for the overcompensators even now," he mutters and Dean bestows him with the best injured look a kid could give, while Sam wonders how John Winchester ever managed to refuse Dean anything if he ever looked at him like that.

Castiel says gravely, "I do not know what that means, but--"

"--you're full of shit," Dean chimes in happily.

To his horror, Sam finds himself wondering WWJD - what would John do? - and maybe it's this thought as much as anything that gets him to shell out for the Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25 eventually.

He buys it and gets it gift-wrapped at the counter while the boys are off chucking dodgeballs at each other (at any rate, Dean is chucking them), but when they return, Dean sees the giant box, looks at Sam, and grins. The little fucker.

Bobby is so going to kill him.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Bobby's head hurts.

"I say we stick Castiel on top of the tree and Dean in the outhouse," Sam declares from his position of gripping Dean's collar very tightly, leaving the squirming Castiel to Bobby.

"Why do we even have a goddamn tree?" Bobby wonders, because it's the only sane thing he can say at the moment.

Sam gives him a look. "In a moment of sentimentality, you decided to give them 'a normal Christmas' since they're stuck like this for a week anyway." His expression indicates how he feels about _that_.

"Bloody idjits," Bobby mutters, and whether he means Sam, the two kids, himself, or the Trickster that inflicted this upon them all, is up to the heavens to decide.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Christmas Day, there's no early morning shenanigans with the jumping on the bed and begging at the top of their lungs that Sam was half-expecting - because, and he feel strange when he realizes it, Dean didn't grow up with stupid traditions like that (neither of them did). And Dean now, Dean-the-kid, doesn't even seem to remember being a Winchester.

Why the Trickster wiped Castiel's memories too is beyond Sam. It gives him a headache when he thinks about it.

Trickster being the Trickster, the spell ends right around 10 in the morning on Christmas day.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&

"You have a lot of explaining to do, Sam," Dean says very evenly, holding the teddy bear Castiel got for him over his crotch as pieces of torn kid clothing hang off his shoulders.

"Me, why me?" Sam wills his voice not to become shrill, because now Dean - adult Dean - is back to witness it. "What, you don't remember anything from the last week?"

"Obviously not," comes the restrained reply, clearly holding back some kind of insane WTF-panic (Sam can sympathize), and then Dean looks over at Castiel, who's holding his head in his hands, and his eyes widen. "Dude, are you okay?"

"The aftereffects of the spell wearing off seem to be causing an adverse reaction," Castiel says, muffled by the new scarf Sam bought him, and then Dean drops the teddy bear and scrambles over to fuss over Castiel while Sam gets a funny feeling because he's seen that gesture before - two days ago when Castiel-the-kid had scraped his knee and Dean-the-kid had gone all mother bear on him, not even letting Bobby dress the wound. He'd insisted on applying the band-aid himself.

"I will be all right," Castiel's saying softly into Dean's palms where he's got Castiel's head between his hands and seems to be trying to massage the pain out of his temples.

"Are you sure?" Dean says just as softly, and when Castiel nods carefully, seems to realize that he's naked and kneeling over an equally-naked Castiel, and Sam can _see_ the blush creeping over Dean's neck. At this point, Sam looks over at Bobby and in the mutual interest of self-preservation, they both rise and leave the room quietly.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

_Some time later_

"Dean? Why did you choose a lightsaber for my gift?"


	3. Under the Christmas Tree

"Are you sure this isn't some kind of blasphemy or something?"

It comes out a bit muffled because Dean might have hit the spiked eggnog a little hard earlier and also because they're under the Christmas tree and Castiel has his head between Dean's legs and a man can't be blamed for being a little imprecise with his articulation when he's getting a blowjob from an angel of the Lord. Anyway, he regrets asking the question because Castiel actually lifts his head off Dean's cock to answer, and even his internal monologue shuts up for a second and realizes that's a bad thing, but it's too late--

"The Christmas tree began as a pagan tradition that was co-opted by Christians in 16th century Germany, so no, it doesn't have particularly holy significance and was in fact condemned by many for its pagan origins," and Dean _knows_ he's cruelly ignoring Dean's wide-eyed pleading puppy face, because Sam's the brother who does the puppy-dog face and everyone knows Dean only makes that face during _dire fucking straits_ that only a cold-hearted monster could ignore. "And Dean, after everything," Castiel packs that word with about several decades' worth of significance which this is totally unfair because a flushed, rumpled wet-lipped guy in the middle of sucking another guy's cock doesn't get to look that calm and collected, "it seems odd that you'd be worried about blasphemy _now._"

Dean makes an inarticulate noise of pain and suffering, which gets a faint eyebrow-raise from Castiel and--totally, completely unfair--he makes to remove his hand from Dean's cock. Nearing panic, Dean gasps out, "Fuck, forget I even asked, just, please--"

Then in the next moment everything's forgiven because a tiny, unbelievable smirk appears on Castiel's face, he lowers his head and swallows Dean to the hilt, and Dean slams his head into the carpet and gets a face full of falling pine needles because oh holy fuck he hasn't been deep-throated since he was twenty and he'd forgotten how amazing, how fucking good it was--his mind registers a sound and after a second identifies it as, fuck, _Castiel moaning_.

Things kind of go offline for a bit.

An embarrassingly short period of time later--Dean remembers _thinking_ "Castiel" really loudly in his head as he came so deep in the angel even now his brain wanders off to a blissful place for a second when he recalls it, so it's possible he might have yelled it out loud too, though he's not making any bets on how coherent and intelligible it might have been.

He hopes to nonexistent God that Sam and Bobby hadn't gotten an earful of whatever he'd yelled and then, "Where did you even learn to _do_ that?" he says to the angel propping his head up with an elbow on Dean's prone hip--and nothing said angel could say would convince Dean that isn't an indecently smug expression on his face.

"I had a general idea," Castiel says, absently licking his lips, somehow making it look innocent (and thus pornographically obscene, and apparently it took literally divine intervention to make Dean switch teams so thoroughly that he can feel himself stirring in interest _already_). Castiel pauses, gaze seeming to drift towards a low-hanging branch, and adds, "Jimmy suggested suppressing his--my body's gag reflex, which was simple to do. You seemed to enjoy it immensely."

"Fuck yeah I did," Dean says. "Um--" he pauses and studies the same branch for a second, "Tell him I said thanks, I guess." He's not going to pretend that Jimmy doesn't present a really awkward thought whenever he's reminded of Castiel's vessel's presence, but they didn't have a choice when it became apparent Castiel was stuck with Jimmy after being cut off from heaven and the two of them were slowly going crazy with sexual tension. Castiel said Jimmy had given his permission, and that's good enough for Dean.

"He says not to mention it," Castiel responds and the small smile he graces Dean with makes up for the awkwardness in the air.

"C'mere," Dean says and pulls Castiel up, savoring skin-to-skin sensation sliding against each other. Their legs tangle and Castiel's head bumps against the tree, sending more needles down on them, and Dean's angel is kissing him softly. The afterglow is a really, really nice come down after the previous intensity.

"Don't let me go to sleep," Dean murmurs.

"Why not? We're comfortable here," Castiel returns between kisses.

"Doubt Sammy expects us to be his present under the tree in the morning," Dean says, and falls asleep anyway.


End file.
